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Melissa Jacobs is the original female football blogger who turned her passion for the game into a career. The idea behind her blog was simple, but Jacobs’ presence in the sports world is one that is vastly necessary and much like last week’s spotlight Julie DiCaro, extremely underrated.
Right out of college, Jacobs became the youngest executive producer in the history of KNBR Radio in San Francisco where she helped to produce a radio show, discussing the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders. After that, Jacobs moved onto ESPN, becoming a producer for two of their radio shows. Eventually, that led her to create the Talent Production department for the ESPN television department. In that role, Jacobs helped to find guests for the shows and produce some of the segments on shows like SportsCenter. At ESPN, she went onto become their talent manager for the ESPY awards show in addition to helping with the creation of espnW.
In 2009, Jacobs started her now famous blog, “The Football Girl“. The blog started as a passion project for her and she described it as “a community that goes well beyond Football 101, recipes and pink apparel.” The blog was unlike any at the time especially due to the female writers. She instead chose to give the female fans what they all wanted which was to be taken seriously and had content on the site including interviews with players, a podcast, fantasy advice, a community for female fans to interact and even some tips for those who needed a little help with the on the field stuff.
The Football Girl became widely successful, mainly due to the people Jacobs was able to interview and the positive reception from major media outlets. It has been featured on Forbes, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Pro Football Talk. Most importantly, the blog would be noticed by Sports Illustrated which is coincidently where Jacobs is employed today.
Now an NFL Editor for SI, Jacobs has truly come full circle but she hasn’t seemed to lose any part of what made her so great to begin with. She still does interviews, talks about important women’s issues in the NFL and gets to write a weekly review of news around the NFL. Melissa Jacobs is truly a pioneer for the female sports blogger and one that shows how success comes to those who work for it.
[…] case you didn’t check out this week’s spotlight yet, Melissa Jacobs is a former ESPN producer turned football blogger turned Sports Illustrated […]